Professor, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

Education & Training

Dr. Morano is a native Californian who received his B.S. in Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine working with Drs. Stephen Weller and Ann Sakai on the evolution of dioecy in flowering plants, and his Ph.D. in Microbiology at the University of California, Davis with Dr. Daniel Klionsky studying vacuolar protein sorting and autophagy. He became interested in protein homeostasis and stress gene expression as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan with Dr. Dennis Thiele. Dr. Morano is a recipient of the GSBS John P. McGovern Teaching Award (2007, 2013), the GSBS Paul E. Darlington Mentor Award (2013), the UT Regents’ Outstanding Teacher Award (2014), and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Protein chaperones and stress response in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The heat shock response is highly conserved in all kingdoms, making it one of the most ancient cellular regulatory systems.

We have two primary interests:

how heat shock is sensed and transduced to yield a genome-wide transcriptional response

how protein chaperones, including the Hsp70, Hsp90 and the Hsp110 groups, function collaboratively ro maintain cellular protein homeostasis during normal growth and during adaptation to environmental stress

The baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is an ideal microbial model system in which to investigate these questions, due to its facile genetics, genomics and ease of manipulation. These studies will directly impact our understanding of how human cells respond to pathophysiological states such as cancer and anoxia which strongly induce a heat shock response. In addition, there is growing evidence that the amyloid diseases of protein misfolding, including prion-based maladies such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow), and other triplet-repeat type disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s Diseases, are intimately linked to protein chaperone expression and function.